This invention concerns personal samplers for detecting the presence of hazardous materials in a working environment, in order to ensure occupational hygiene and safety.
Stringent environmental control in the working environment is imposed to ensure that hazardous materials or conditions such as poisonous gases, micro-organisms or radioactivity, can be detected without delay. Devices to detect such hazards, known as personal samplers, usually consist of a sampling head fixed to the lapel of the user and connected by flexible tubing to a pump and battery pack carried on the back or on a belt at the waist.
These devices are cumbersome to the wearer, expensive to produce and often produce a false reading of the environmental contents at chest level which may be different from those collected in the immediately adjacent breathing zone around the nose and mouth.
An object of the present invention is to provide a personal sampler which is considerably more compact and less expensive to produce and is designed to sample the atmospheric contents as near as possible to the nose and mouth.